Rosie Duffield: So what is domestic violence or abuse, and where do we get our ideas about it from? Often we see the same images and stereotypes on TV: housing estates, working-class families, drunk men coming home from the pub, women surrounded by children, and a sequence of shouting, followed by immediate physical violence or assault. But soap opera scenes tend to focus on only one or two aspects of a much bigger and more complex picture.
Domestic violence has many faces, and the faces of those who survive it are varied, too. There are 650 MPs in this place—650 human beings. Statistically, it is highly likely that some of us here will have directly experienced an abusive relationship, and we are just as likely as anyone else to have grown up in a violent household.
Abuse is not just about noticeable physical signs. Sometimes there are no bruises. Abuse is very often all about control and power; it is about abusers making  themselves feel big, or biggest, but that is not how they present themselves. It is not how they win your heart. It is not how they persuade you to meet them for a coffee, then go to a gig, and then spend an evening snuggled up in front of a movie at their place. When they ask you out, they do not present their rage, and do not tell you that while they like the idea of strong, independent, successful women, they do not like the reality. They do not threaten, criticise, control, yell, or exert their physical strength in an increasingly frightening way—not yet. Not at the start. Not when they think you are sweet, funny and gorgeous. Not when they want to impress you. Not when they turn up to only your third date with chocolate, and then jewellery. Not when they meet your friends, your parents, or the leader of your political party. They do not do any of that then.
It is only later, when the door to your home is locked, that you really start to learn what power and control look and feel like. That is when you learn that “I’ll always look after you,” “I’ll never let you go,” and “You’re mine for life” can sound menacing, and are used as a warning over and over again. It is when the ring is on your finger that the mask can start to slip, and the promises sound increasingly like threats. It is then that you spend 12 or more hours at work longing to see the person you love, only to find that on the walk or tube journey home they refuse to speak a single, solitary word to you. Eventually, at home, they will find a way to let you know which particular sin you have apparently committed: your dress was too short, the top you wore in the Chamber was too low-cut, or you did not respond to a message immediately.
It starts slowly: a few emotional knocks, alternated with romantic gushes and promises of everlasting love, which leave you reeling, confused, spinning around in an ever-changing but always hyper-alert state, not knowing what mood or message awaits you. You tell yourself to be less sensitive, less emotional, to stop over-analysing every little thing. Ignore the moods—he never stops saying he adores you, right? All seems good again.
A whole week goes by: a week of summer evening walks home and maybe a drink on the way. A long weekend is booked and organised as a surprise while you are at work. The journey there is full of promise and promises—time away alone together in a place away from stress—but then it starts. In a strange city, his face changes in a way you are starting to know and dread, in a way that says you need to stay calm, silent and very careful. He goes for a walk. You sit in your hotel room and wait. You read a city guide and plan which sights you want to visit, mentally packing a day full of fun. But he seems to have another agenda. He doesn’t want you to leave the room. He has paid a lot of money and you need to pay him your full attention. You are expected to do as you are told, and you know for certain what that means—so you do exactly as you are told.
In the months that follow, those patterns continue: reward, punishment, promises of happily ever after alternated with abject rage, menace, silent treatment and coercive control; financial abuse and control; a point-blank refusal to disclose his salary or earnings, an assumption and insistence on it being okay to live in your home without contributing a single penny, as bills continue to pile up; a refusal to work, as your salary is great and public knowledge; false promises to start  paying some specific bills, which you discover months later remain unpaid; and the slow but sure disappearance of any kindness, respect or loving behaviour.
You get to the stage where you are afraid to go home. After 15 hours at work, you spend another hour on the phone to your mum or a close friend, trembling, a shadow of your usual self. You answer the phone, and the sheer nastiness and rage tell you not to go home at all. So you leave work with your best friend, exhausted and shaking, and buy a toothbrush on the way, knowing that the verbal abuse followed by silent refusal to speak at all will be 100 times worse tomorrow.
Every day is emotionally exhausting. You are working in a job you love but putting on a brave face and pretending all is good, fine—wonderful, in fact. Then the pretence and the public start to drop completely: being yelled at in the car with the windows down, no attempt to hide behaviour during constituency engagements —humiliation and embarrassment now added to permanent trepidation and constant hurt and pain. It is impossible to comprehend that this is the person who tells his family how much he loves you and longs to make you his wife.
But the mask has slipped for good, and questions are starting. Excuses are given to worried friends, concerned family and colleagues who have started to notice. One night, after more crying and being constantly verbally abused because you suggest he pay a bit towards your new sofa, you realise you’ve reached the end and you simply cannot endure this for another day or week, and certainly not for the rest of your life. Having listened intently for two whole weeks to the sound of his morning shower, timing the routine until you know it off by heart, you summon up the courage to take his front-door keys from his bag.
You have tried everything else on earth and know for certain, 100%, what awaits you that night if you do not act today. Heart banging, you hide them carefully and creep back into bed, praying he won’t discover what you have done. You know for certain what will happen if he does. You know an apology will not follow. You know for sure it will be because of what you have done and that it is all your fault. He leaves for the gym, telling you how much he adores you. He tells you to remember that you will always be his. He kisses you lovingly, as though there has not been months of verbal abuse, threats and incidents he knows you will never disclose. He tells you he will bring something nice home for dinner.
Sure enough, the next few days and weeks are a total hell—texts and calls and yelling: “You’ve locked me out like a dog”, “No one treats me that way”, “This is the last thing you will ever do”. You cry, you grieve for your destroyed dreams, you try to heal, you ignore the emails from wedding companies, but it is like withdrawal, and it takes six months.
But one day you notice that you’re smiling, that it’s okay to laugh, and that it’s been a week or two since the daily sobbing stopped. You realise you are allowed to be happy. You dare to relax and you dare to start to feel free. You realise it is not your fault and that he is now left alone with his rage and narcissism. You dare to start dating someone, and you realise that you have survived, but the brightest and most precious thing of all is realising that you are loved and believed by friends, family and colleagues who believe in you and support you.
So if anyone is watching and needs a friend, please reach out, if it is safe to do so, and please talk to any of us, because we will be there and we will hold your hand. [Applause.]

Victoria Atkins: I hope that colleagues will forgive me if I depart from what Ministers normally do in winding up—which is to look at our files and the prepared speeches that our wonderful officials write for us—and speak from my heart because this has been an extraordinary debate. We have had the most compelling, the most heartfelt, the most heartbreaking examples of domestic abuse laid out before us. I cannot hope to do justice to those accounts in the short time that I have, but I will do my best. Any points that I have not been able to cover, I will, of course, write to hon. Members and put letters in the Library.
There have been 38 Back-Bench speeches in this debate and every single one has had an extraordinary contribution to make to the Bill. I should say that I am particularly grateful to the Lord Chancellor, who joins me on the Front Bench. I also want to record my thanks to the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), who is replacing—if he can be replaced—my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar) in working through this Bill. I want to record my thanks to them.
In those 38 speeches, many, many experiences—horrific experiences—have been put before us. Hon. Members have very much drawn us into the lives, the suffering and, as I have said, the heartbreak of millions of our fellow citizens, whether constituents or not.
There are a few names out of an incredibly long list that I will mention because they have caused such an impact in the Chamber and, indeed, outside the Chamber. The first is that of Natalie Connolly. My hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) and, indeed, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), the Mother of the House, set out the agony that the Connolly family have gone through in the case coming before the court concerning their dear daughter, Natalie, the facts of that case and of similar cases. I cannot help but be horrified by some of the experiences that victims of sadomasochistic sexual acts, which defendants then claim as a defence in court, have gone through. It is extraordinary and I will very much go away and reflect on the matter. It may not be this Bill that deals with that, but I do think that we must look at it very carefully and see what more can be done.
The next set of names that I think the House was touched by—I am very mindful that Claire is here in the Gallery—are those of Claire, Jack and Paul Throssell, represented very ably by their Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith). I have had the privilege of meeting Claire and listening to her experiences at first hand. I would challenge anyone not to be incredibly moved by Claire’s story and not to be haunted by her story for many, many days after they have heard it, so I thank and salute Claire for being here today and working on behalf of other victims.
The hon. Member for Leigh (Jo Platt) mentioned Leanne and Nikita. I thank her for bringing their experiences into this debate.
Then we move on to our friends and colleagues who have themselves been incredibly brave in describing their own experiences. My friend, the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), talked about her mother Zoora, and of course about her own experience of forced marriage. I am very keen that we all understand that although the words “forced marriage”, “FGM” and so on are not in the Bill, they are examples of the categories of behaviour that we have set out in the definition, and they will be in the statutory guidance, so people should be under no illusion: we consider those acts within intimate relationships to be examples of domestic abuse.
Then, of course, there was the account of our friend, the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield). I sat here listening and thinking, “She is doing a very good job of representing her constituent. This is a terribly sad tale.” It was not until she said, “and then you introduce him to the leader of your party” that I shook myself a bit and thought, “My goodness—are we on a journey different from the one that I had anticipated?” She used words that every person who works in the field of domestic abuse will recognise, such as “hyper-alert” and “abject range”. She spoke of bills piling up and finding out months later that they were unpaid. And then there was the final phrase: “emotionally exhausting”. The hon. Lady has done more to further the cause for victims of domestic abuse today than we have seen in a very long time, and I thank her sincerely for her contribution.
This Bill is truly groundbreaking, and I am delighted that we have agreement on that. I fully accept and acknowledge that we are not all agreed about parts of it, and of course that will come through in the scrutiny of the Bill. But we have this Bill before us today because  of the determination, commitment and grit of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I think it is extremely telling that, after some 20 years on the Opposition and Government Front Benches, she has chosen as her first contribution to speak in this debate about a cause that is very close to her heart. I am extremely grateful to her not just for her contribution today, but for the fact that we have this Bill and are driving this work forward in Government.
There are other colleagues I feel obliged to mention, because I see this as a Bill that is owned by the entire House. I must thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), who started the journey by bringing in, with the Lord Chancellor, the controlling or coercive behaviour offence. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), who was my predecessor in this role and who insisted on the terminology of economic abuse being included in the definition, because our understanding of it is so much better than it was even a few years ago. At the risk of sparing the blushes of a member of the Whips Office, I must also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones) because when he was on the Front Bench in another guise, he worked hard on the secure tenancies provision that we now see in the Bill.
As I say, I consider this to be a Bill that is owned by the whole House, and I thank colleagues across the House for their work not just today, but in the run-up to Second Reading. That includes, of course, the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). I tried to learn some Welsh before I got to this part of my speech, but I am afraid that it is beyond me. I also thank the “professional feminist”, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), who does so much work —work that we are now much more comfortable talking about—tackling the perpetrators, including serial perpetrators, to stop the cycle of abuse.
I also thank the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) for his work on cross-examination—it is always a pleasure to work with him—and, of course, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who has been and continues to be a staunch advocate for victims of domestic abuse. I look forward to grappling with some of the more difficult issues with her in due course.
I am delighted that the Bill received the level of pre-legislative scrutiny that it did through the Joint Committee, which was chaired so ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller). Her leadership and that of others on the Committee has meant that the Bill is in a better place than it was before they scrutinised it. We have accepted many of the Committee’s recommendations and there are still recommendations that we are working on and may add in Committee. I thank every member of the Committee and its Chair.
The hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) asked Ministers to be open hearted. We are absolutely open hearted in admitting that this Bill is not yet in the place that it should be. It has to be perfected through scrutiny. In particular, hon. Members have rightly raised the issue of refuges. Hon. Members may recall that, when the Bill was introduced, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s consultation on refuge accommodation was still live, so by definition we could not make amendments to the Bill or add clauses at that stage. However, we are working through the  consultation responses and I am confident that we will be able to move amendments in Committee, which I very much hope will meet with hon. Members’ approval.
I am conscious, too, of the comments made by the hon. Member for Bradford West and others about specialist services. I myself have been on a learning curve when it comes to the particular requirements of women who are perhaps suffering cultural difficulties as well as abuse, in the more conventional sense that we would understand, in the home. That will very much form part of our review of those services.
Colleagues have also rightly been holding me to account on funding. This year’s spending review, being a one-year review, is unusual, but we are clear that funding will be a priority in the 2020 spending review and we will push for appropriate funding for all the important services that hon. Members have mentioned.
I also acknowledge the concerns about migrant women. Women—all people who are suffering domestic abuse—must be viewed as victims first and foremost. We have not got it right yet with migrant women, but we are conducting a review, as we told the Joint Committee we would. We are looking at everything and will do our very best to bring forward those proposals in Committee. There might be things that we can do that do not need to be in primary legislation. The House should bear with us while we work through the review and we will see what more we can do.
Colleagues have rightly mentioned the definition. There have been many thoughts about whether it goes quite far enough. I am very conscious of the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who raised the impossible situation that a constituent and their family found themselves in with a person—a therapist—in a trusted position. There are concerns about positions of trust. [Interruption.]
I have just had my dress tugged, because if I do not sit down before 7 o’clock, the Bill will fall, so forgive me if I stop mid-sentence, Madam Deputy Speaker. I very much hear colleagues’ concerns about the definition and, if I may tackle the gendered point, we absolutely acknowledge that domestic abuse predominantly affects women. However, we are conscious that, of the estimated 2 million victims in our country, about a third are male. We cannot ignore those victims. In fairness, I do not think that anyone is suggesting that we should, but we are going to make the gendered nature of the crime apparent on the face of the statutory guidance, which I think will be significant.
To sum up, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead said, this statute is only part of the solution. There is consensus that we all have to ensure that people begin to understand what domestic abuse entails, that the relationships that they are entering into are not healthy and that girls growing up can expect much better from relationships in their adulthood. That is absolutely what this law and the non-legislative measures are directed at. The Bill is vital, but there is so much more that we need to do to ensure that everybody understands that domestic abuse is everyone’s business.